Frenzies of the Visible

Hard Core is initially a historical study showing how the sexual explicitness of hardcore is located within cinema's initial promise of the visually real. The book is informed by a Foucauldian perspective on this 'will to truth; but also utilizes psychoanalytic and Marxist concepts of fetishsm and its discussion of the main hardcore films is through genre.Its aim is to show how a seemingly male-oriented discourse actually exhibits ambiguities and polymorphously perverse pleasures, therefore making it possible for women to gain some erotic purchase on pornography. However, there are a number of problems with this analysis; In its use of foucault, which promises a setting of pornography in more of a socio-political formation than is given: in the arguments on truth and fetishism, in the treatment of hardcore as a genre, which uses a restricted body of films to make a more general argument. A deeper attention to the institutional and social settings of varieties of pornography is therefore needed to give a more nuanced picture.     

More than bricks and sticks: Five components of community development corporation capacity

Abstract

Community development researchers, practitioners, and funders have recently begun to emphasize the need for community development corporations (CDCs) to build capacity. However, the practice of using the term capacity without carefully defining it allows for a wide range of meanings to be assigned to the term and hinders efforts to study and measure it. Capacity is often defined narrowly in terms of housing production, oversimplifying a complex concept and process.

To remedy this shortcoming, we create a framework that views capacity more broadly by dividing it into five components: resource, organizational, programmatic, network, and political. We believe that this more concrete way of thinking about capacity will be particularly useful to practitioners, funders, and policy makers. We apply our definitions to CDCs, particularly those that work with local intermediaries called community development partnerships (CDPs), in order to better understand the role of CDPs in the process of building capacity.     

No Handmaidens Here: women,volunteering and gender dynamics in the Sydney New Theatre

This paper considers the role of women in the Sydney branch of the New Theatre, from 1936 to 1969. In contrast to other gendered spaces found in the theatrical, industrial and political spheres, women held together the New Theatre. Not only did the theatre give opportunities to women as performers, but women embraced roles as directors, stage managers, writers, designers as well as holding elected offices. Drawing on oral histories and archival research, this study presents new scholarship on Australian women’s leadership in the theatre, arguing that their pattern of involvement was shaped by the voluntary nature of the work, the longevity of involvement, their political commitment and the theatre’s democratic structure. The blending of organisational and creative leadership created spaces for women’s voices in ways that were crucial to the long-term success of the Theatre, at a time when women were generally expected to focus on the domestic sphere.     

Same same but different. Die Feldtheorien Fligsteins und Bourdieus und das Potenzial einer wechselseitig informierten Perspektive für die Wirtschaftssoziologie

Field theoretical approaches have become popular within economic sociology. Many even consider the notion of ?field“ a suitable alternative to the hegemonic paradigm of ?embeddedness“. This article outlines the epistemological potential of a field theoretical perspective by systematically comparing the approaches of Neil Fligstein and Pierre Bourdieu. By examining their respective contexts of emergence, their theoretical and methodological references, their research interests and their central concepts, both similarities and differences between the two approaches become visible. The resulting insights allow for a field theoretical and profoundly relational perspective on economic phenomena that might stimulate ongoing debates within economic sociology.